Vignesh Ananth

About me

My name is Vignesh Ananth and I’m a masters candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison studying Economics. I focus primarily on Econometrics and quantitative methods in Economics.

I am fascinated by data. Specifically, I am interested in blending ideas from Econometrics with Data Science and Machine Learning. I have been interested in the sharing economy for a while. I built a sharing economy startup called Neighbourbase in 2015. You can read about the lessons I learnt from that experience here. My current research interests are in studying the sharing economy platforms like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb etc. in a data driven manner using causal inference techniques from Econometrics. For example, I studied the effect of ride sharing platforms on traffic congestion.

I am also currently writing a paper on human interaction with Machine Learning systems, exploring questions of trust formation.

When I’m not doing any of these things, I enjoy reading books about non-fiction technology, psychology and economics - honestly anything that is non-fiction. I enjoy heavy doses of Wired, New Yorker and The Atlantic. I also like to consider myself an amateur runner; while I have done a couple of half-marathons, my dream is to run a full marathon or an ultra marathon one day.